OK, I admit this is not as serious a problem as the affordable housing
shortage but...
I have an urban pet peeve: Snipe advertising.
It's graffiti's kissin' cousin, illegal ads you see stapled to telephone
polls. I'm generally cool with garage sale ads or obviously local things (as
long as they come down after the sale), but what really steams me are those
increasingly gigantic corrugated plastic signs that advertise LOSE WEIGHT
NOW or EARN BIG BUCKS FROM HOME. (The friggin' Coast Guard even tacked up
snipe recruiting posters on Nicollet this winter.)
Visual pollution to the max, and advertising stupid/dangerous/deceptive
stuff besides (Coast Guard excepted).
Is it me or is snipe advertising exploding around the city? (Once you get a
pet peeve like this, you notice the stuff everywhere.)
I'll admit, I am a snipe vigilante. If you notice a snipe-free zone from
40th to 46th on Nicollet and Grand, well, I'll take credit. (Of course, if
what I'm doing is illegal, that last sentence was written by my evil twin.)
On my neighborhood walks, I regularly rip or wrestle this stuff down. It's
getting tougher; snipers use these rivets with plastic washers to attach
their signs to poles, and tend to put 'em up high, so you have to reach up
and rock the sign from side-to-side to get the rivets to pop out. Since I
walk for exercise, I view this as extra calisthenics.
Now that I've outed my Charles Bronson self, a few questions for those in
the know:
1. These plastic come-on signs ARE illegal, right?
2. Is a "citizens arrest," i.e. removing them, legal?
3. Is anyone at the city responsible for taking them down (such as Solid
Waste, as with graffiti)?
4. Has anyone ever been prosecuted? Some of these folks must put up hundreds
of signs
5. When do these things go up? Dead of night?
I've also fantasized about staging a "Stamp out Snipe Day," where everyone
around the city would pull these suckers down, a la an Urban Spring
Cleaning. I don't know if we could offer a bounty, or maybe give everyone
with a ripped-down sign a free ticket to a concert or something.
Anyway, thoughts for a snipe-free spring...
David Brauer
King Field - Ward 10
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